sheena blackhall

Bus Journey - Poem by sheena blackhall

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It’s pencil-scrawled, the bus’s destinationAs if the actual journey might be arbitrary, Uncertain, an Odyssean travail.

The driver is both Chaplinesque and sinister.Above his square moustache, the eyes behind the glasses Are grim as the F.B.I.He grips the steering wheel with whitening knuckles.He is festooned in bling, a Stirling Xmas tree In flaming June.

A woman with silver toenails, flowing silver hair Entwined with pink like Barbie seaweed, Rests her feet on a chair, a drying mermaid.

I pay and sit. Stare at an empty ashtrayThe trip begins. My old bones judderIn their skin bag. The aisle-smells, pee and petrol.

A school decants itself. The bus floods with a many-headed hydra.Beano Bedlamites…Luddites of law and orderHotspur hooligans. I am breathing icebergsA cloud thunderous with perturbationHangs over us. Puberty hands me a shocked wreath.

Straps hang from the roof, two rows of idling noosesI can imagine heads there, swaying like coconuts at a country fair.

Three seats are wearing jagged gangland scarsAcross their faces. Veterans of vandal wars.

The bus stops and the wincing door’s kicked openThe pupils whooping pour outsideLike a bucket of oil on daisies

Somebody opens a window in the roofAir, straight from the mountain rushes in, a calm orisonA feast of balm. A brightening on the horizon